In the cold waters off Antarctica, a solitary, yellow glider named the "Blue Hen" keeps track of the penguins that graduate student Megan Cimino monitors from a lab in Lewes.

Fellow student Matthew Breece follows endangered Atlantic sturgeon as they move along the Delaware and New Jersey coast each spring with a similar, autonomous, underwater robot that picks up acoustic signals from specialized tags implanted in the fish.

And associate professors Doug Miller and Art Trembanis are using underwater robots to track sea scallops off the coast.

These robots – some autonomous and some operated by remote control – are a growing part of the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment research program.

The University of Delaware’s Angelia Seyfferth has received a prestigious five-year, $465,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award for studies on arsenic in rice, and the funding will provide for the installation of the first rice paddies in the state.

The rice paddies, to be created on the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources(CANR) campus in spring 2015, will not only aid Seyfferth’s research on potential methods to lower arsenic levels in rice – a staple crop for nearly half of the people on Earth – but they will also provide an important teaching tool for UD graduate and undergraduate students, and local high school and middle school students, as well.

A research team at the University of Delaware has developed a new method for observing chemical reactions in real and rapid time at the boundaries between soil mineral particles and water.

Details of the new method and the revealing data obtained with it were published Sept. 19in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications.

According to lead author Matt Siebecker, a former doctoral student in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, the research will benefit the design of cost-effective remediation strategies for contaminated soils as well as improve conceptual models of what happens to metal ions in soils.

The Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN) has announced its first cohort of DENIN Environmental Fellows. The new fellowship program assists doctoral students whose research interests demonstrate a clear bridge between science and society.

The four recipients were selected based on their proposals for doctoral research that will benefit the environment in Delaware and beyond, as well as their demonstrated experience and commitment to communicating and transferring the benefits of their research to the wider world.

The life cycle of the blue crab is that females migrate to the saltier water in lower Delaware Bay to spawn, outbound tides form a current that transports them away from the coast and then, several weeks later strong, northeast winds push them back toward shore and into the estuaries.

Scientists who figured out this blue crab transport model can't really predict blue crab stock size based on this complex connection between tides, winds and currents in the estuary and ocean because of the many variables in the weather, tides and timing of the crab hatch, along with crab mortality, said Charles Epifanio, Harrington Professor Marine Science at the University of Delaware College of Earth, Ocean and the Environment.

The Delaware Environmental Institute is now accepting applications for up to 20 paid undergraduate research internships focused on environmental topics during the 2014-15 academic year.

The purpose of the DENIN Environmental Scholars Program is to provide interested students with a sustained research experience over the academic year.

Internships will be carried out during the fall, winter and spring semesters, beginning Nov. 1. Fall and spring semesters are a part-time commitment, while Winter Session is considered a full-time commitment for five weeks. Interns will receive a stipend of $4,250.